14 DAY TRIAL // Grand Theft Auto V is now out on the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, with the PC version of the same game set to be offered in January of 2015, and the way the title has shot up the sales charts suggests that gamers are interested in picking the game up and re-playing it even if they experienced the world of Los Santos first on the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360.
The biggest problem for a player who, like I have, explored about one third of the game but then lost interest is that there is almost no incentive to experience everything again on new consoles and then get to explore the new Online activities and just move through the city in single player.
But the game continues to deliver some impressive stories, most of them related by co-workers, and I would really want to play through some of them and make my own choices to see the consequences on the world, ideally without spending too much time with the open world aspect of GTA V.
Dragon Age Keep might offer a solution
Before Dragon Age: Inquisition was launched, BioWare chose not to allow for saved games from either Dragon Age 2 or Origins to be imported on launch.
Instead it has introduced a new online service called Keep, which allows all gamers to explore the world of the game and the narrative that the company previously created and make their changes.
The context was limited but it was easy to create a world state, save it and then export it to Inquisition to use and then see how the world of the game changes.
When I first saw the Keep in action, I fantasized about a future where gamers no longer actually need to play all the quests of a big role-playing game and they simply have the choice to explore those chapters of the game that sound the most interesting, with simple decisions used to move the rest of the action along.
GTA could benefit from something similar
The open world Rockstar game is big, interesting at times, sometimes boring and an online initiative similar to the Keep would do wonder for player engagement.
It would ideally allow someone to simply make decisions and push the story along until they get to a mission they really want to play and then export a file that the game itself can read.
Once that mission is done, the save could be brought back to the online service and the process can be repeated until players get to see the elements of GTA V that they find interesting.
